Facebook (FB) Adds to Gains Ahead of Next Week's Annual Developer Conference

Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) is continuing to power to new highs today, with the stock up another 1.8% to $84.24 currently. As noted yesterday, no exact news can be pinpointed for the strong action although positive sentiment has been noted. Another reason for the upside could be the upcoming annual developer conference - F8. Yesterday, Facebook released the schedule of sessions for the event, which will take place on March 25-26 in San Francisco.

Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter weighed in on the upcoming event in a note to clients today. The analyst said while there is not a lot of detail on each session, they can get some insight into what to expect from the brief title and description given for the session.

Schachter highlights the fact that "last year’s session titles were not announced ahead of time, but looking at the 2014 session titles now, the titles do give investors some idea of key issues that were discussed."

Given the session titles and descriptions, the analyst highlights what to expect.

1. Facebook Video: Unclear what they will say at the conference, but we think that a stand-alone video app is possible or some other video focused tool to help with video accessibility and organization, particularly on mobile.

2. News Publishing on Facebook: possibly a response to TWTR’s strength in news.

3. Third-Party Distribution of FB Ads: we have been particularly excited about FB’s recent announcement of hitting 2 million advertisers and we expect FB to leverage that with third-parties.

4. Messenger: unclear what to expect, but we expect news on Messenger’s evolution. Interestingly, the co-founder and technical lead of Instagram is included in a conversation session with a co-founder of WhatsApp and the VP of FB Messenger.

5. A Keynote on Virtual Reality and why FB is so interested in its development over the long term.

6. Commerce: a session on using “Facebook's tools to help build and grow your commerce business".

7. Monetizing Apps via FB ads: there are two sessions focus on this topic.

Further, the analyst notes a session titled “Messenger: Reinventing Everyday Communication“ is the only one of all the sessions listed that does not show the titles of the speakers. "This could be a simple oversight, or it could be that their titles are related to something new with the Messenger product and that by showing them, it could ruin a potential surprise," he said. The three speakers on that session (all FB employees) are:

• Lexy Franklin – according to his LinkedIn profile is “a behavioral change agent….I create tools + experiences that motivate people to make amazingly positive choices. Choices like walking to work, instead of driving. Choices like donating to charity, instead of not helping. Choices like buying your (awesome) product, instead of somebody else's.”
• Matt Steiner – a former Google employee who according to his LinkedIn profile “worked on storage systems, indexing systems, mail systems, scoring systems, web crawling systems, photo and video storage, processing, and serving systems. I've been a tech-lead on Google Groups, Google Reader, Google Buzz, Google Photos, and Google+. I was one of the original 12 leads on Google+. I designed many of the Google+ and Photos interactions. I invented Auto-Backup, Auto-Organize, Auto-Highlight, Auto-Enhance, and Auto-Awesome for Google Photos. I recruited leads for this projects (both internally and externally) and staffed the teams to executed on these projects. My team also launched Google Auto-awesome Movies, Auto-Awesome Year-in-review, and Auto-Awesome Stories."
• Seth Rosenberg – former banker and entrepreneur.

The analyst also notes a number of sessions on other topics, including: FB login, App analytics, security/privacy, Parse, Internet.org, sessions on learning about growth from FB’s own experiences, enhancing games, and more

The firm maintained an Outperform rating and price target of $92 on FB.

For an analyst ratings summary and ratings history on Facebook click here. For more ratings news on Facebook click here.

Shares of Facebook closed at $82.75 yesterday.

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